Take what you can, give nothing back…

Tens of thousands of Americans who went through bankruptcy are still haunted by debts long after — sometimes as long as a decade after — federal judges have extinguished the bills in court.

The problem, state and federal officials suspect, is that some of the nation’s biggest banks ignore bankruptcy court discharges, which render the debts void. Paying no heed to the courts, the banks keep the debts alive on credit reports, essentially forcing borrowers to make payments on bills that they do not legally owe.

The practice — a subtle but powerful tactic that effectively holds the credit report hostage until borrowers pay — potentially breathes new life into the pools of bad debt that are bought by financial firms.

One of the reasons I left the Republican party and the Libertarians was because it became increasingly clear with the wake of the Great Recession that no matter how well trusting the free market to act in its own long term best interests worked in theory, in practice, companies (especially large corporations and big banks) were thieving amoral sociopaths who would sell their mother for organ harvesting and sex work if it meant seeing their personal bonuses or stocks rise 1%.

We need an activist government that really polices these institutions. And I’m not talking about the cozy regulatory apparatus we have now that impose small fines that the institutions can write off as the cost of doing business. I’m talking about real cops with real handcuffs and real guns that will haul off the executives of these organizations to real jails.